Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Last week we also decommissioned the last of our physical servers. We are now operating our entire website "in the cloud" as the kids would say. Specifically, we are using Amazon Web Services. If all went well, you didn't notice a thing. If you want to, you can Ask me Anything about the move or our servers.

Our history with AWS goes back many years. We were one of the early adopters of S3. We liked S3 because it was fast, cheap, and allowed kn0thing to upload logos without our logs looking like this:

When it came time to add the oft-requested thumbnails feature, we decided to expand our usage of S3, using it to host all of our thumbnails.

In November 2008, we had come to a crossroads. Do we get another cabinet full of servers, or do something else? We decided to do something else, and moved some of our batch processing over to EC2 and thereby freed up more machines to be application servers.

That system worked so well that we decided to move our entire website over to EC2 in May of 2009 (you may remember the 10 hours of downtime, but probably not, since it was Friday night through Saturday morning).

And as of last week, we finally decommissioned the last legacy system we had in our datacenter. It should be noted that up until that point, we were still using the servers paid for by YCombinator's initial investment to run part of the site (thanks Paul!).

And now it is picture time!

Here is what the cabinet looked like before we started:

Here is what it looked like when were done:

Here they are back at the office:

Here is me draining the internet tubes that went to the cabinet (they locked me in till I was done):

Here is me shutting off the rest of the datacenter, because I can (sorry Twitter!):